Chapter 191: Too Far

There's no time inside a fold. That's the first thing people ask me about it, and it's the truest thing I can tell them. You go in and you come out, and between them there isn't a between. It's like blinking. Mary once timed me across the inner court with her watch, forty yards, and said it took exactly as long as it takes to not take any time at all, and wrote that down, and underlined it.

That's a short fold.

A long one, a fold of a hundred miles, still takes no time. But it takes something else instead. It takes you. You feel the distance not as hours but as weight, as if the miles were water and you were carrying all of it, a bowl filled to the brim down a very steep stair. That's why I go in pieces. Ten miles of weight, and then you put the bowl down and rest your arms. Ten more.

I didn't put the bowl down.

* * *

I went into the fold from the lower court of Westmere Hold, and the court went, and the stars went, and Tamar's lamp, and Benjamin's white face, and the ring of frost on the cobbles, and then there was the dark.

It was the dark between places. I know it well. I've been in it ten thousand times, for no time at all. It's not black, exactly. It's more like the inside of your own eyelids on a sunny day, warm and dim and full of a color you can't name. It's quiet. It smells of nothing. Usually I don't notice it any more than you'd notice the door you walk through every morning.

This time I noticed it.

Because this time I was still in it after I should have been out. And the weight came on.

It came on all at once, like a sack of grain dropped on my back from a height. The first fifty miles. Then the next fifty, on top of the first. Then more. Hills and rivers and dark woods and sleeping villages and frozen fields, the whole long middle of the country, all of it coming down on me in the warm dim dark, heavier and heavier, the way snow comes down on a roof, until the roof groans.

I groaned.

I couldn't hear myself. I'd lost my ears somewhere around the first river. Not lost them; I could feel them, I knew where they were. They were just too far away. They were back near Westmere, hearing the Hold hum. My hands were out ahead of me somewhere over the downs. My feet were in the river. I was being stretched, the way you stretch a piece of dough, thinner and thinner across three hundred miles of dark, and the thinner I got the heavier it was, and I understood, quite calmly, that this was what Benjamin meant. That this was what my father would have told me if I'd asked him. That nobody does this because you can't. Because there isn't enough of you to go around.

* * *

I want to set down what I saw, because I saw things. I didn't expect to. In a short fold you see nothing.

In this one I was everywhere I was passing through, all at once, the whole length of the way, the way a long rope is in every part of the river it's lying in.

I was in a barn on the downs where a cow was calving and a man with a lantern was on his knees in the straw saying come on, girl, come on. I was in the black water of a millpond with the moon in it. I was in an orchard, in a bare apple tree, among the twigs. I was on a bridge. I was in the bell tower of a church in a market town, and the bell was cold and still and I thought, Mary would like this bell. I was in a room where a woman sat up in bed nursing a baby by a candle, and she looked up, straight at me, as if she'd felt a draft, and pulled the shawl closer, and looked down again. I was in a wood with a fox. I was on a road where two carters had stopped their wagons nose to nose and were arguing, very politely, in the dark, about who should back up.

I was in Fern Ford. I know it was Fern Ford because I passed through Helena's sister's kitchen, and I know Helena's sister's kitchen, I've eaten her cake. It was dark and the fire was banked and there was a cat asleep on the bread bin.

And all of it was heavy. Every barn and bridge and sleeping cat. All of it was on my back. And I was thinner and thinner, and somewhere about the middle of the country, over a long dark lake with no name I knew, I started to come apart.

* * *

It didn't hurt. That was the frightening part.

It was like going to sleep. Little pieces of me just let go, the way your fingers let go of a book when you nod off reading. I felt my left hand go. Not hurt. Just go; it was there, and then it wasn't anywhere, it was over a forest somewhere, spread out thin as mist, and I couldn't find it. Then my left eye, the dark one. That went easily. It had been half gone since the autumn. And then something deeper. Something that wasn't a hand or an eye.

I forgot which way was east.

It sounds like nothing. It was everything. I'd been holding east the whole way, the way you hold a rope in a flood. Carol's lamp was east. Benjamin's road ran east. Home was east. And suddenly I didn't know which way that was. I was everywhere at once, three hundred miles long and as thin as breath, and every direction was the same direction, and the weight was very heavy, and I thought, quite clearly and without any fear at all: I could just stop carrying it.

I could put the bowl down. Right here. Over the lake. It would be so easy. I'd just be spread out over the whole country, a little bit of me in every barn and bridge and orchard, thin and quiet, like frost. It wouldn't hurt. It would be like sleep.

And then I heard my father's voice.

Not really. He was three hundred miles away running across the inner court. But I heard it the way you hear a voice in your head that you've heard ten thousand times, so that it's worn a groove there, like feet on a stair. I heard him say the thing he says to everybody. To Malachar. To the milk boy. To me, every morning of my life, when I was small, at the kitchen table, so I'd know who I was before the day started.

What's your name?

* * *

Garrick, I said. In the dark. To nobody. Garrick Elias Grey.

Where do you live?

Greykeep.

What do you want?

And I knew. I'd always known. It was the easiest question there's ever been.

Home.

And east came back.

It came back the way a compass needle swings when you set it down: wild for a moment, all over the place, and then still, and pointing. East. There. Carol's light, very far and very faint, at the end of everything, like a candle in a window at the end of a long dark field. Benjamin's road under my feet, under the feet I couldn't feel, barefoot, smelling of roses. And the weight was still there, all of it, every barn and bridge, but I had a name to carry it with again, and a place to carry it to.

I picked the bowl back up.

* * *

The last hundred miles were the worst. I won't pretend they weren't.

I'd found east, but I hadn't found the rest of me. My left hand was still somewhere over a forest. My hearing was still back at Westmere. I was a long, thin, stretched-out thing, and as I came on toward home the weight didn't get lighter, the way you'd think it would as there was less of the way left. It got heavier. Because I was tired. Because I'd been carrying it for no time at all and that's the longest time there is.

So I held on to things.

I want to write down what I held on to, because Mary says the book should have it. She says one day someone else will have to do something they can't, and they might want to know what got me through mine.

I held on to Seraphina's hand on my face on the back stair. Not always. Tonight.

I held on to Carol on the harbor wall, turned all the way around with her eyes shut, holding the light.

I held on to my father at the kitchen table. What's your name.

And I held on to my son and the wolf.

* * *

I'll put this down here, because it's where I thought of it, over the downs south of the river with three hundred miles of dark on my back, and because it matters for what comes after.

He'd walked on Sunday. Twenty-three steps across the court in the snow, past all of us, straight to Fenrir on the warm strip by the kitchen wall. Everybody knows that. Mary drew the footprints.

What nobody wrote down, because it happened a little at a time, the way the important things do, was what came after.

He went back the next day. And the next. Every morning, the moment anybody put him down on his feet, he turned around wherever he was and set off for the kitchen wall, at his new fast wobbling stagger, with his arms out, and if Fenrir was there he fell into him, and if Fenrir wasn't there he stood on the warm cobbles and shouted until he came.

He had a word for it by Tuesday. His newest word, and the one he uses most. I'd hoped the next one would be Papa. It was not Papa.

It was Fen.

He said it about everything good. Bread and honey was Fen. Grandpa's wooden horse was Fen. The fire was Fen, and the snow, and his mother singing. Seraphina said it was the highest praise he had, that it simply meant the best thing in the world, and that we should all be very honored to be Fen by association. But it started with the wolf, and the wolf was the most Fen of all. He wouldn't go to sleep at night until he'd been carried down to wherever Fenrir was lying and put his hand flat on Fenrir's nose. Just that. His hand on the great gray nose, for as long as it took him to decide about it. Then he'd say Fen, quite firmly, as if he was signing something, and let himself be carried up to bed.

Fenrir let him. Every night. Fenrir lay perfectly still with his yellow eyes half closed while a boy who couldn't yet say his own name put a hand on his nose and named him the best thing in the world.

Loki watched it every night from the kitchen step and said nothing at all. I've never seen Loki say nothing for that long.

* * *

Then on Wednesday, the day Wynn went home, there was the pot.

I wasn't there. I was in the drafting room with Eleanor. Helena told me, and Mother, and Loki, and they all told it the same way, which is how you know a thing's true in our house. I haven't put it in its place in this book until now. I couldn't, that week. I'm putting it here, where I thought of it.

Helena had the big stockpot on the kitchen hearth, the iron one, the one that takes two people to lift, with the bones for the week's soup at a hard boil. And my son, who had been walking for three days and believed himself to be master of all he saw, walked into the kitchen on his own while Helena's back was turned, straight across the flags to the hearth, because the fire was Fen, and reached up with both hands for the long iron handle sticking out over the edge.

Fenrir had been asleep on the warm strip outside. Nobody saw him get up. Helena says the kitchen door was shut, and then it wasn't; it was swinging on its hinges and there was a great gray wolf the size of a small horse between my son and the hearth.

The handle came down. The boy had it. He pulled, the way babies pull, with all their weight and no idea of what's on the other end.

The pot tipped.

And Fenrir didn't move.

That's the part they all told me the same. Helena, white to the lips, telling it at the kitchen table that night. Mother. Loki. He could have moved. He's a wolf; he's faster than anything in Greykeep but Thor's lightning. He could have snatched the boy away by the back of his smock and been across the kitchen before the pot came over. But that would have taken a heartbeat, and the water was already coming, and in a heartbeat it would have caught the boy's hands, his face.

So he stood over him instead. He put himself over my son like a roof, all four feet planted, head down, and the whole of the stockpot came down on his back.

Boiling. A gallon and more. Bones and all.

Fenrir didn't make a sound. Helena says that was the worst of it. Not a sound. The steam came up off his back in a cloud and the water ran down his sides and pooled hissing on the flags all around him, and he stood there, rock still, over the boy, and my son sat under him on the dry stone in the middle of it all, perfectly safe, perfectly dry, looking up at the great gray belly over his head with the steam coming off it, and said, delighted:

"Fen!"

And Fenrir stood there until Helena had snatched the boy out from under him. Until he was in Helena's arms on the other side of the kitchen. Until he was safe.

Then he walked out of the kitchen, slowly, and lay down in the snow in the court, and shut his eyes.

* * *

Mother healed him. She went out into the court in her shawl and knelt in the snow and put her hands on the scalded back, and the light came out of her hands the way it does, slow and warm, and Fenrir lay and let her. It took an hour. The fur on his back came in white afterward, a long white saddle-mark from shoulder to hip, and it's still white. Mother says it always will be.

Loki sat in the snow beside him the whole time with his hand on Fenrir's head and didn't say a word until the end. Then he said, to nobody, or to Mother, or to the snow:

"He's never once in his life moved out of the way of anything for himself. Not the chain. Not the gods. Not any of it. He just stands there and takes it. I used to think it was stubbornness." He looked down at his son. "It's not. He was waiting to find something worth standing in front of."

My son was brought out at the end, in Helena's arms, wrapped in two blankets. He saw the white on Fenrir's back. He reached down out of Helena's arms toward it, both hands, and Helena, after a moment, bent and let him.

He put his hand flat on the white fur. He looked at it for a long time.

"Fen," he said. Very quietly. Not the way he says it about honey. Some other way.

And Fenrir opened his yellow eyes and looked at him, and put his great head down on the snow beside the boy's dangling feet, and stayed there.

He's slept outside my son's door every night since. Not on the warm strip. In the cold corridor of the east range, on the bare stone, across the threshold, with his back to the door and his face to the stair.

* * *

That's what I held on to over the downs, with my left hand lost over a forest and my ears back at Westmere and three hundred miles on my back. The white mark on the wolf's back, and my son's hand on it, and the wolf lying across the door.

Fenrir would be there. Whatever was in the halls. Whatever was singing. If Seraphina was on the east stair with our son, Fenrir was between them and whatever was coming up it. I knew that the way I know east.

And then I felt home.

* * *

It was the outer wall first. The old wards. Eleanor's work and her teachers' before her, and older than that, the walls of Greykeep that the Castellan lives in. I felt them coming up out of the dark ahead of me like a cliff face out of fog.

And they were shut.

I'd known they would be. The Castellan had told me. But I'd never felt it. All my life, folding home, the walls have opened for me like arms. This time they were a wall. A real one. Smooth and hard and closed all the way around, every crack sealed, every door barred, the whole of Greykeep pulled in on itself like a fist. The Castellan had done what it said. It had closed everything. It had closed itself against the whole world, and I was part of the world.

I hit it.

I don't know how else to say it. I'd been coming three hundred miles in no time at all with all that weight on my back, and I came up against Greykeep's shut walls like a wave against a harbor wall, and I broke on them.

That hurt.

Everything I'd carried came down on me at once. Every barn and bridge and sleeping cat. Every mile. And the fold, the long thin stretched-out fold that was me, started to tear. I felt it go. Like cloth. A long rip, starting at the edge and running back toward Westmere, and pieces of me starting to fly off it into the dark like sparks off a fire, and I thought, this is it, this is what it costs, this is what nobody pays, and I couldn't get through and I couldn't go back and there was nowhere to put the bowl down.

And then a hand came out of the wall.

* * *

A very small hand.

It came through Greykeep's shut walls the way a baby's hand comes through the bars of a cot. Not breaking anything. Not opening anything. Just through, because it was small enough, and because it belonged there, and because the walls knew it and didn't mind.

It was reaching for me.

I knew it at once. I'd know it anywhere. It had been flat on my cheek on the stair that afternoon. It had been flat on a wolf's nose every night for a week. It had my power in it, the borrowing, the folding, the thing that's only mine and was never only mine at all, because I'd given half of it away the night he was born without knowing. And his mother's flame, a tiny bright coal of it, burning in the palm.

My son had felt me hit the wall.

He was somewhere inside, somewhere dark and close and small, somewhere that smelled very strongly of tea. I could feel him, the way you feel a candle in a dark room. And against the other side of the little door he was behind, pressed up to it so close that the boy could feel its warmth through the wood, a great gray shape lying across the threshold like a hill, like a wall that breathed. Fenrir. And in front of the wolf, somebody old and stubborn with something heavy in his hands. And beyond them both, the singing.

And my son, in the dark, behind the wolf, had put out his hand toward me through the walls of Greykeep, the way he puts it out to his mother when he wants to be lifted, and he was saying the only word he'd ever needed.

Up.

So I took his hand.

* * *

I came out on my knees in the kitchen garden.

I know it was the kitchen garden because my face was in Helena's winter cabbages. The frost came off me in a ring and turned the cabbages white for six feet in every direction. Blood was coming out of my nose, a lot of it, and both ears, and I couldn't feel my left hand at all, though when I looked down it was there, at the end of my arm, white as the cabbages. My left eye was open and dark. My right eye wouldn't focus. The world was ringing like the inside of a struck bell.

I was home.

I'd folded three hundred miles in one stretch, from Westmere Hold to the kitchen garden at Greykeep, and nobody's ever done that, and I'd done it, and I knelt in the frozen cabbages and couldn't stand up. I didn't care. I knelt there with my face in the leaves and my blood on the frost and laughed, once, because I'd done it, and because my son had caught me, a boy who couldn't yet say his own name. And then I stopped laughing.

Because the ringing in my ears was going down. And as it went, I could hear.

And Greykeep was full of singing.

* * *

From Mary's book. A page in her small straight hand, headed only with a time:

12:04 a.m., Saturday.

Garrick came home. Three hundred and twelve miles, Davren says, from Westmere Hold to the kitchen garden, measured afterward on the map-room floor with a string. One fold. Nobody has ever.

He came out in Helena's cabbages. They are still white.

Helena says she will not pick them. She says they can stay white till spring.

And under that, added later, in the same hand, the pen pressed hard:

Fenrir. Wednesday. The stockpot. A white saddle on his back from shoulder to hip, Evelyn says for always.

He sleeps across Uriah's door now. Every night. On the stone.

Uriah's word for the best thing in the world is Fen.

There's no guest line under it. But in the margin beside the last line, in a different hand, a long slanting extravagantly looped hand that for once is very small and very plain, someone has written:

He was waiting to find something worth standing in front of. L.